Machinery is widely used in modern industries. For example, machinery can be found in the power generation industry, oil and gas industry, aircraft industry, manufacturing equipment, and so forth. Normally, during machine operation, machine parts or units may degrade and encounter unwanted conditions such as wear and tear, corrosion, cracks, fractures, deformations, electrical failures, and other conditions that negatively affect the operation and effectiveness of the equipment. For example, turbine blades can be prone to mechanical damages over time, such as fractions or deformations, leading to abnormal vibrations or even an outage of the turbine.
Regular inspection, examination, and testing of the machinery can be useful for maintaining proper and intended operation of the machinery for a long period. In certain instances, there are inspection regulations in many industries that require performing predetermined tests and periodic measurements. Inspectors can typically use inspection template spreadsheets for making notes in regard to certain testing operations. Unfortunately, the inspection template notes are often written by hand, thereby making them difficult to aggregate and analyze. Moreover, inspection templates are often not uniform between inspection sites. For example, inspectors may not use any standards to describe a particular damage or problem with a certain machine unit. Thus, nearly identical issues can be described differently, thereby making it difficult to analyze the inspection data.
Additionally, inspectors may fail to properly examine machinery due to the complex nature of the machinery being tested. For example, an aircraft engine may have millions of parts. It can be a time-consuming and challenging task to locate certain engine parts and examine them according to predetermined standards. The inspectors do not always have access to inspection guidelines or may not be aware of how to perform certain tests, especially when they deal with a new type of machinery. Accordingly, inspection is, for the most part, a manual process, which is not uniform across industries or even sites of the same organization, and consumes a large amount of resources and time for planning, execution, and analysis.